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Son'a collector model
Until the [[Star_Trek_films#Alternate_Reality_films|re-imagined Star Trek]] film of 2009, , tied with , and , has been, after , (holding the record with nine introductions), the Star Trek live-action production that introduced the most new ship and station designs at once, eight each, the Son'a collector being one of them. As with the other Son'a starships to appear in that movie, no description of the collector was given in the script, when it appeared for the first time in scene 128, merely mentioning that "THE FOUR SON'A SHIPS - (OPTICAL) dwarf the Enterprise as they move into orbit..." Nevertheless, there was one locked-in script requirement that set the collector apart from its Son'a counterparts as it specified in scene 248 that, "EXT. SPACE - BRILLIANT SOLAR SAILS begin to unfurl majestically in front of the planet's rings... and now we recognize it as the remarkable device we saw earlier in Ru'afo's simulation." Design The fact of the Son'a ships being very ambiguously described in the script left Illustrator John Eaves with considerable leeway to come up with his own designs for the vessels of a race that has not before been referenced to in the Star Trek universe, as was envisioned by his supervisor Herman Zimmerman, "John is such a talented man, I normally give him first crack at whatever the idea is that we've discussed with the director. He pretty much comes up with what he thinks that is, then we talk about it. The idea was to bring a kind of art nouveau sense into the Son'a ships, as if they were extensions of the organic Ba'ku culture that they have left, and, without actually giving that part of the plot away, give the subliminal feeling that these cultures were connected. That was really where we started with those designs, and I think John just did a wonderful job." ( , p. 61) Eaves, as the designated production illustrator, responsible for the design of the collector recalled, "'' All the Son'a ships are from activity games I found out in the backyard. I wanted to give a whole different kind of look to their architecture, so I kind of went with yard toys - Ru'afo's ship is based on a horseshoe, the battleship is based on a boomerang, the shuttle is a yard dart, and the science vessel ... well, the front of it is sort of a badminton shuttlecock turned inside out."" Another common design feature Eaves incorporated into all of his Son'a shops designs originated from the interior of a , "ships also have a kind of an inset detail that looks like a bunch of riblets; I based that on the strings inside a piano. I thought it would be fun to do that–their design is kind of like intricate wiring and framework, which is inset but open so you can see it. That was what I used as their kind of icon of design. It's on all the ships to an extent; you can see it extensively on Ru'afo's ship and the battleship, while the others had it inverted." ( , p. 21) One of these "others" was the Son'a collector that did not expressively show the theme on the outside of the hull, but which he had, among others, incorporated in the otherwise barely seen inside of the prong assembly. Eaves started working on the vessel in March 1998, and his preliminary take on the design was quickly approved for further refinement. A noteworthy design feature was the dual prong assembly feature located at the prow of the vessel with its appendices dramatically flaring out. Mindful of Co-producer's Peter Lauritson predelection of having the Son'a ships flying with their appendices swept backward, Eaves designed the collector as such, unlike his previous designs for the Ru'afo's flagship model and Son'a battle cruiser model, whose flight directions he had to reverse on the producer's urgings. Also in this stage, his design featured two fixed extended booms up front, from which the sails would deploy. "''At that point we'd planned to have multiple wings unfolding and a forcefield acting as collector. This blue glowing field would then direct the methaphasic particles onto the sails. It would have been more a visual effect and less physically tangible." (Cinefex, issue 77, p. 88) Initially, Eaves intended the "multiple" wings to number three in order to break up the conventional Star Trek design style, but he was reined in by the producers who decided to go with two large sails. ( , p. 23) At this point in time, it was also decided to dispense with the fixed booms, and instead having them incorporated and deployed from the main body. This necessitated Eaves, wanting to retain the interesting looking prongs, to re-designate them from sail armatures to engines. (Cinefex, issue 77, p. 88) Eaves has additionally stated, "With its sails foiled back the '''Son'a science vessel' called as such in scene 246 has the shape of a badminton birdie that's been hollowed out. The outside is sectioned into threes, and it's hollow all around them, so if you look at closely, it almost appears to be a ship within a ship.", adding that with its sails unfurled it was "much like a giant TV dish" (The Secrets of Star Trek: Insurrection, pp. 92-93) As designed, and later executed as CGI effect, the unfurled sails of the collector were very reminiscent of those of the Bajoran lightship (designed by Jim Martin and built as a CGI effect by John Knoll), for the ''Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode . This was not a coincidence, but intentional as Eaves recalled, "They wanted those same kind of sails", further stating, "The sails pretty much went through all the design processes over at Santa Barbara CGI house. I think it's so lovely the way they fold out. That came from Santa Barbara." ( , p. 22) An different ending from the one that was featured, was originally envisioned for the movie, and which was partially filmed. In it, Ru'afo escaped from the collector by use of an escape pod, by Eaves simply referred to as "Ru'afo's pod". True to form Eaves, designed a collector escape pod for use in the movie. Yet, eventually an alternate ending was decided upon, making Eaves' work superfluous, at the eleventh hour. Nevertheless, first unit filming at the time, involving F. Murray Abraham, playing Ru'afo, had already been shot and the whole sequence was in an advanced stage of development, the sequence being geared for the addition of the visual effects. (Star Trek: Insurrection (Special Edition) DVD-Special feature, "Deleted Scenes") Eaves had the pod docked at the tip of the aft of the vessel, where he would later position the "injector launch area". The revised ending of the movie, necessitated further refinements on the design, something Eaves embarked upon three months later, in June 1998. For starters, Ru'afo's pod was replaced with the "injector launch area", comprising a whole aft section of the collector. Initially, Eaves intended the whole section, functioning as the injector mechanism, to be launched into Ba'ku's rings. ( , p. 22) However, in the final version of the movie, the launch was only visualized in a long shot as a simulation, and the injector mechanism was toned down to a probe-sized contraption, apparently using the original design of Ru'afo's escape pod as a stand-in. Another noticeable design change Eaves performed, was the change of the asymmetrical dual prong assembly into a symmetrical triple one, thereby "sneaking in" his design preference he originally had for the sails. This time around, the configuration was followed through in the final representation of the vessel. Study model While, the on-screen model was to be executed as a CGI model, Eaves' design was of such intricacy that a physical study model was called for, for the CGI modelers at Santa Barbara Studios (SBS) to mull over. Afterwards, when additional visual effects work for the interior of the collector was called for, the study model was turned over to Blue Sky/VIFX, in order to match their interior work to that of the exterior. The study model was built by long time Star Trek staffer Greg Jein. (Cinefex, issue 77, p. 91) The model was based on Eave's earlier March designs and featured therefore the configuration with the asymmetrical dual prong assembly structure, instead of the symmetrical three prong structure as later adopted. As , the Son'a collector study model, including miscellaneous parts, measuring 33×7×7 inches, was sold in the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on 1 June 2007 for US$936.00. Included in the miscellaneous parts was a study model of Ru'afo's escape pod that had already been constructed as reference for the respective visual effects houses. CGI model The movie Insurrection, was the first feature film where it was conceived that all the visual effects would be executed as computer-generated imagery (CGI). At that point in time, the technique was still relatively new, and the workload entailed in creating these effects was such that it was decided to employ two effects houses for their creation; Blue Sky/VIFX, was contracted to provide all planet bound effects, whereas Santa Barbara Studios (SBS) would be responsible for all the space bound visuals. Since the first visual in the feature of the vessel was an exterior one in outer space, the construction of the Son'a collector exterior therefore fell to SBS. SBS' Effects Supervisor John Grower stated, "John sent us elevation views and one or two ¾ perspective drawings of each ship, but we had to do a lot of deduction work. The Son'a Flagship and Battleships had very complex shapes and all of these incredible compound curves, which didn't appear in the plan views." As to underscore Grower's comment, Eaves produced an extra drawing as visual aid, apart from Jein's study model, for the modelers at SBS of the collector model to mull over, showing the prong assembly detached from the main body. Continuing, Grower added, "They're thin in one dimension and very wide and long in the other, kind of like a trilobite. The biggest challenge was that the Son'a ships didn't look the same from one angle to the next, so if we rotated around them a little bit, their profile changed because they had hundreds of compound curves that hooked together to form their shape. Getting it all to flow involved a ton of work and a very long modeling process." Apart from the intricate designs, creating digital ships on the computer was a labor, and time consuming effort from a technological standpoint as well, given the state of CGI technology at the time, as Grower further recalled, "Each ship was made up of lots of surfaces, and the databases were hundreds of megabytes per ship. These models were very heavy, but ''the CGI software package of choice at SBS allowed us to efficiently structure and organize the data. We went through several iterations the ship designs before we got approval, and Maya helped a lot there as well. Once we got the ships approved, of course, we had to make them look real." (American Cinematographer, January 1999, pp. 41-42) The CGI sails of the collector were produced with "Cloth", an embedded software module within the Maya software package. Animator Mark Wendell recollected, "''Some of the sail motion is based on a custom shader written by Ron Moreland, while other aspects come from the real dynamics you get with Cloth. The basic principles are similar to those in Dynamation ''a particle generator module in Maya–a series of geometric vertices attached with spring calculations that apply to each specific vertex–and Maya has taken that spring idea from Dynamation and rewritten it to be more stable and less rubbery. But each patch of Cloth needed to be tacked at the edges, and the largest number of patches Alias/Wavefront the name of the company that owns and markets the Maya software had ever tested was four–a shirt front, back and two sleeves. Since the sails needed to be attached between all the ribbed structural elements on the collector vessel, we used upwards of forty–we gave it a real workout." SBS textured the sails to resemble coppery-gold chain mail, but due to the long shots their surfaces came across as a continuous surface of grainy cloth. (Cinefex, issue 77, pp. 88, 90) Though later referenced to in the ''Deep Space Nine television series and , the Son'a would never again be visually featured, nor would any of their ships, so none of the CGI Son'a starship models were ever upgraded in the CGI software for later representation. Son'a collector break-away models The less than stellar test screening of the footage of the orginal ending, to wit Ru'afo's escape in the escape pod, eventually led to a series of events resulting in the fiery destruction of the collector as depicted in the movie. Neither effects house was confident enough to execute the pyrotechnics heavy effects in CGI. While those effects, CGI explosions and fire effects, were by then already commonplace for the television franchise (especially in Deep Space Nine), that, however, given the state of the technology at the time, was not yet the case for big-screen motion picture productions, due to their higher resolution requirements at the time. It was then decided, at the eleventh hour, to execute those effects using traditional visual effects methods, through the use of pyrotechnics and break-away models. (Cinefex, issue 77, pp. 91-92) Being outside their original assignment of having to provide CGI effects only, SBS was more or less at a loss. Though partner company Blue Sky/VIFX did maintain a physical model making shop at their east coast facility, which SBS did not, they were nowhere near outfitted enough to fulfill the eleventh-hour requirements, asked for. So SBS passed that bucket to Hunter/Gratzner Industries, which was specialized in providing such services. CEO Matthew Gratzner recalled, "We got a call from John Grower asking if we could deliver a gray buck of the collector in two weeks. I figured we could give them something more that that–a hero miniature with plenty of detail. The powers-that-be at ''Star Trek agreed to let me storyboard and design the sequence–which was really a necessity, since I had to come up with miniatures that could actually be fabricated in the limited time available. I always say that visual effects are not expensive–it is the lack of decision-making regarding visual effects that is expensive. Since there wasn't any time for interference with the creative process–it was more a matter of "that sounds cool; go ahead ahead and do it"–we were able to finish on time. Picard is at the one end all the way to the other end of the ship through this vast interior as it starts to blow, with explosions coming towards him and the camera." (Cinefex, issue 77, p. 92) As to underscore the importance of the task at hand, SBS's Visual Effects Producer Bruce Jones also placed a call, as Gratzner recalled,, "''We got the call on a Friday from Bruce Jones, the visual effects producer at ''Santa Barbara Studios. He said, "Hey, we got this shot, what can you do in two weeks?" I said, "Send over your drawings of the ship.", because I knew nothing about the show or what this ship was supposed to look like. So, When Bruce Jones asked me what I could do in two weeks, I told him that he'd have to let us storyboard the sequence around what I knew we could build in that time frame." (Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models International, issue 35, p. 21) Nevertheless, despite Hunter/Gratzner Industries's prowess as a visual effects company, some work had to be sourced out in order to meet the very tight deadline. For the providing of the master templates of his company's break-away models Gratzner turned to Innovation Arts, run by Paul Clemente. Gratzner had SBS sent them the CGI-files of the collector for them to cut foam master "bucks" for various parts of the ship, as well as molds made from them. ''Initially we were going to have sculpt and cast a pattern for this ship, but I'd have pulled all my hair out figuring a way to do this plus the big panel pieces. So I thought of ''Innovation Arts.(...)They've refined 3-D milling, routing and cutting to an art, and were able to take pared-down files for the collector from Santa Barbara, the mill, cut out and ship all the parts to us–turning the whole thing around in less than a week. The foam buck pieces were cut from six-pound urethane foam, which did not take long–reading the files actually took longer. Initially they were going to send those on to us for molding, but Paul Clemente offered to do the molds and the jackets there before shipping. They had to run twenty-four-hour shifts, but still delivered on time.", Gratzner reiterated. (Cinefex, issue 77, p. 92) Son'a collector enlarged break-away panel models With the construction of the basic parts of the break-away models for the time being out of the way, buying Hunter/Gratzner valuable time, that company could concentrate on constructing the large close-up break-away panels. Gratzner has stated, "''We didn't have any finite details. We took the computer files, which, when enlarged, just looked like a 'patchwork of squares'. Since you never get that close to the ship, the best way that I could come up with was a design that looked ''Star Trek in appearance. It had a lot of oblique angles, not as rectilinear as Star Wars or as organic as Alien: Resurrection'. Without any time to do any research, we had to go with what I came up with." No less than eight 6×10 feet panels were constructed, each pulled from gigantic one-piece molds. Onto the backsides, being pre-cut at strategic points (aiding in keeping the debris small and in scale during the explosions) for easy disassembly when blown up, balsa stringers were attached for added support. Into those, resin trusses were placed, totaling around one hundred per each large breakaway panel. These would form under the surface skeleton, seen in silhouette through the fire. Detailing, to match the "checkerboard" grid as featured on the eventual full-scale break-away models, was comparatively easy, when it was applied by Model Maker Brian Ripley, and Model Painter Leigh Alexandra Jacob. Upon completion the panels were taken to Van Nuys, California, the location of the Chandler Group for filming by Tim Angulo and Don Baker. At the Chandler Group facility, Ian O'Connor of O'Connor FX set up the pyrotechnics for the destruction of the panels, "''Ian O'Connor put something like two hundred and forty hits in the eight foot model. Into the large breakaway panels he ran primer cord and charges everywhere along the undersurface.", as Gratzner recalled. (Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models International, issue 35, p. 21) O'Conor himself noted, "Sherry prepped the backs of the pre-broken panels on the large HGI pieces, using flammable material on some. These would fragment as they were blown up toward camera. Other pieces were treated with material that contracted when heated, so those would crumple and twist and melt while flying upward. They wanted the Enterprise flying right over thew explosions rather than sailing on in front of them, so that meant keeping the hits very small, flooding the panels with slow-burning composition that caused debris to come only a little bit–maybe twelve to eighteen inches–off thew surface. Those fireballs couldn't go too far up though, because then they'd cross into the area occupied by the CG Enterprise during its flyover–which would have been a roto nightmare. So we had to orchestrate a number of tiny blasts that moved across the surface. We had secondary explosions going off underneath that added jolts and some interesting colors. As the blasts came closer to the camera, the events were spaced out a bit more, with the final six feet filled with primer cord to really demolish the thing. Between the foreground end of the model and camera, we put two big mortars that fired a big sheet of flame up under the lens, wiping the frame." (Cinefex, issue 7, p. 92) All panels produced, were lined up to form a huge 6×30 feet slab. Three high-speed cameras covered the detonation from every angle. O'Connor's explosions in the feature swept down from the rear to the font, solliciting a remark of high praise from Gratzner, "Ian O'Connor pulled of some phenomenal stuff. He literally did "miniature pyro", producing fireballs that were eight or nine inches in diameter. On screen they looked thousands of feet tall." (Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models International, issue 35, p. 22) Son'a collector break-away ship models Son'a collector interiors :(under construction) As stated, the aforementioned less than stellar proof screening of Ru'afo's escape scene, precipitated an alternate ending, involving the more spectacular destruction of the collector, and Picard's and Ru'afo's altercations within the collector, or as Blue Sky's John Kilkenny reiterated, "The whole third act had changed a lot from the time of our first bid, and then changed again prior to the film's release. Frakes and Zimmerman had been limited by the height of Paramount stages when building the live-action part of the collector set. That wound up being thirty-six feet high and maybe sixty feet across, so we extended its length to seemingly enormous proportions by adding a multitude of floors beneath the two figures." (Cinefex, issue 7, p. 91) External link *Star Trek: Insurrection Concept Art (Part 2) at Federation Starship Datalink Category:Studio models